Epicurus

Epicurus, a Greek philosopher, born at Samos, of Athenian origin;
settled at Athens in his thirty-sixth year, and founded a philosophical
school there, where he taught a philosophy in opposition to that of the
Stoics; philosophy he defined as “an activity which realises a happy life
through ideas and arguments,” summing itself up “in ethics, which are to
teach us how to attain a life of felicity”; his system comprised “the
three branches included in philosophy, viz., logic, physics, and ethics,”
but he arranges them in reverse order, logic and physics being regarded
only as the handmaids of ethics; for he “limited logic to the
investigation of the criterion of truth,” and physics he valued as
disillusioning the mind of “the superstitious fear that went to disturb
happiness”; he was a man of a temperate and blameless life, and it is a
foul calumny on him to charge him with summing up happiness as mere
self-indulgence, though it is true he regarded “virtue as having no value
in itself, but only in so far as it offered us something—an agreeable
life.”